Watch: An Ingenious Lego Machine For Sorting Legos

Lego is fun. Organizing Lego is not so much fun. So when a project is done, the pieces sit there on your carpet—waiting quite stealthily despite their bright colors—to embed one of their brick soldiers deep within the flesh of your foot. Such is the goal every Lego piece aspires to. Your buildings are just a side gig. (Sorry, friend.)

In acknowledgement of this fact, viral-renowned Lego builder Akiyuky (who you’ll know from his Great Ball Contraption) has developed an epic, automated machine to sort his Lego pieces. Called the Lego Axle Sorter, it can rip through a small bucket of Technic axles in a matter of minutes.

The video is a testament to factory-line engineering. It’s downright hypnotic to watch the axles enter the hopper, make their way across a single-file track, be queued perfectly into their own chambers, and eventually fall into a bin of their classification. But how do the right pieces fall in the right places? The larger pieces drop first, through what you’d assume would be big holes that correspond with their size. The smaller pieces pass by these holes, counterintuitively, thanks to a tiny shelf. This shelf shrinks smaller and smaller along the line, and it’s never big enough for the largest pieces at each stage to stay afloat.

But maybe so much explanation takes something away from the fun. So let me leave you with this: Everything I just said was complete nonsense. What you’re witnessing is a piece of magic, born somewhere in Ford’s Model T production line, channeled today to YouTube for your enjoyment.